I'd guess there's some degree of irony in that all of the CD's I've purchased recently have been related to finding music on
AudioGalaxy. There were a lot of things it did right, besides being a sharing center. Primarily, it had good information on many artists. And even for ones that it didn't have good information on, it did have pretty decent links between most artists. Audio Galaxy also did right by having a fairly constant (and long) list of song titles. Due to this last item, I started finding a lot of Pizzicato Five (a terrific Japanese combo with five U.S. full-length releases, and lots and lots of imports) that I hadn't heard by just clicking through the pages.
But Pizzicato Five do something right - they make really good releases. Ultimately, a release just has to be owned. Part of it is to get the translations from Japanese to English. But a lot of it is that the releases have a nice feel to them. All of their U.S. full length releases have been in some form of digipack, a format that I personally like better than Jewel Box. Inside the digipack is a nice booklet with lyrics, some production notes, and (usually) many photos of the two stars, Yasuharu Konishi and Maki Nomiya, always very fashionable. The music, words, packaging, and images have gone towards making this cosmopolitan brand for a universe one would love to be in all the time - full of jetsetting, nightclubs, wandering. It's a sort of "Breakfast at Tiffany's" come to life.
The point I'm getting to is that there is a growing rift between volumes of DVD purchases and Music purchases. One hypothesis is that this is due to perception of value - the DVD typically costs only a few dollars more than the increasingly overpriced CD's, and come packed with special features and (in some cases), special packaging. A typical mass-market CD on the other hand has that tacky jewel case, the booklet that's hard to get out, and usually one or two hits that will be listened to. It's understandable why there's the shift. Yet, the music industry continues to blame file sharing for its woes, not the fact that it's too cheap to either lower prices or improve the perception of quality of its own material.
This leads back to the stories of AudioGalaxy and Pizzicato Five. I've already bought a couple of $40 imports because of music I heard on AudioGalaxy, and I have my eyes on more - including an expensive and rare vinyl box set. There was even one domestic P5 release that I got entirely on line (one that I had avoided getting for years) that I recently replaced with an actual CD. I wanted that book, that packaging, and crisp clear copies of that music. I was paying for a quality release, with no bad songs and nice extras.
And it was still pithy to the packaging of
Sa E Ra Japon. This Japanese release, which finally showed up today, has so many wonderful bonus features. On top of a phenomenal suite of music, the box and its contents are things of their own beauty. The CD is in a DVD sized paperboard tri-fold box, with clear color photos inside. Inside the box, along with the CD (in its own cardboard/cloth sleeve) is a big full color booklet in Japanese and some English, and many photos. But on top of all that was a little package containing a sticker, a book marker (with a track listing, again all in Japanese), and two postcards. In small type on the back of each, one mentions the birthdays of Yasuharu and Miss Maki, the other mentions sharing writing with other Pizzicatomaniacs around the globe.
Quality release? You bet. But I never would have even thought of pursuing it had it not been for three tracks downloaded from AudioGalaxy.
I don't think any major-label solution is going to yield results like this. There are so many music lovers out there that are sick of radio, and smarter than advertising, and just want to find their own next big thing. Where are they going to hear it? Where would I have gone to realize that there are some other Japanese artists like Yukari Fresh and Takeko Minekawa worth checking into, and other similar ones to avoid?
Well, there are
some answers. A nearby
Barnes and Noble book/music store has started using a system (which I'm sure other stores use too) where you can listen to any CD in the store. It does this by streaming out a portion of each track. What's nice about the system is that it has many more CD's in its database than the store itself has. I've actually been using this in lieu of Audio Galaxy to check out some new artists. The trouble is, I can't download it.
But, looking at my habits, if I'm not going to buy it, I'm really just not going to buy it. If I listen to a segment at the record store and think "hmm, they really do sound nice" but am not compelled to buy, I'm not. It's the same way with a lot of downloaded music - it's nice to listen to, but not really worth that much to me. The upside of the downloadable is that it has a much stronger chance to grow on me if it's in my iPod and in the right playlist. Seriously - this is my version of commercial radio. With the ability to do this easily being pinched upon on all sides, I'm now less likely to hear something worth buying. And thus, I'm much more likely to get something out of the DVD section of the store instead of the CD section. To the music industry: you're not giving me enough perception of quality to buy on a whim, and you're not giving me enough channels to discover and enjoy new music in. And you're not going to get that much money out of me because you're just giving me less and less reasons to give it to you. And your so-called copy protection plans give me even less reasons. I'm still steaming from the extra fifty dollars I had to spend to get extra equipment to hook my DVD Player (playstation 2) up to my classic TV because I couldn't use the nicely available ports on my VCR (which was, at that time, the only way to get an outside signal into the television).
And I'm not looking forward to the day when I find an import of a Pizzicato Five DVD only to find that I can't play it on my Region 1 equipment. If CD's behaved like DVD's in regards to this "Region Encoding" crap, I'd have significantly less CD's on my shelves. And again, Music Industry, you'd have even less money from me and those like me.
So, you can keep going down the road you're going down, but stop your damn whining. It's your own fault that people are spending less on Music (well, you could blame the flooding of bad music into ALL markets, enough so that there's no perception of quality there either, and again - no good channels for people to discover new music any more. Which leads to further disbelief in your industries ability to make quality product that's worth paying for).